I got my start in the film biz as a sound effects Recordist. By some miracle, Walter Murch answered the phone when I called American Zoetrope in 1978 and asked to speak with him. After a couple of meetings, he inexplicably hired me to work on “Apocalypse Now.” Previously I had paid lots of dues working long hours for not much dough in non-commercial radio stations, and I had some wonderful experiences there I’ll talk about in other blogs, but that phone call to Walter blasted a magical opening in the sky, and the beautiful beam of light that came down has been following me around ever since.
 
The first several months on Apocalypse I spent exclusively recording sound effects for the film. At that time there were no libraries of Vietnam War sounds. In fact, there were virtually no sound effects libraries of any kind except for the ones held by the major “Hollywood” studios. A high percentage of those sounds were recorded poorly, stored on noisy media, many of them were from the 1940s and 1950s, and almost all were mono. Francis Coppola and Walter had extremely high expectations for the sound in Apocalypse, so we had no choice but to record most of the sound effects ourselves.
 

Walter would give me lists of things to record, and he encouraged me to dream things up on my own as long as they might be useful for the movie. I recorded everything from a fly buzzing around the window of Captain Willard’s hotel room, to footsteps on the boat taking him up the river, to noise in the background of Colonel Kurtz’ radio broadcasts, to Huey helicopters, 50 caliber machine guns, and explosions for the battle scenes.
 
I learned quickly that anything the mics picked up during a recording session might be worth keeping. Very often a sound you don’t anticipate happening when you go to a given location turns out to be the best thing you record that day. I remember one afternoon when I was recording random noises on a short wave radio for Kurtz’ (Marlon Brando’s) broadcast. After about an hour of slowly tuning the receiver and getting the usual kinds of white noise, distortion, and tones, suddenly I started hearing a kind of fluttery sound that felt amazingly like a helicopter. It was not a copter, but a kind of interference between two signals in the radio spectrum. Pretty cool, because it worked well as radio noise for the scene, but also evoked the nearly omnipresent sound of helicopters in that war, and it had a ghostly feel about it too. Perfect, and completely unexpected.
 
And here’s the thing I want to say about sound effects libraries…
 
That same kind of serendipitous discovery can happen when you let your ears wander through a library, as long as you make sure those ears are tuned to be open to happy accidents. As you listen, pay attention not only to sounds that exactly fit your criteria, but also sounds that fit the emotional, dramatic criteria the project needs, even if they have absolutely nothing to do with what you THINK you’re supposed to be seeking for a specific moment in the show.
 
I have used almost every sound I’ve ever recorded for a movie, though not always for the film I was working on at the time. Same goes for libraries. Almost every sound in a great library will be exactly what you need for some project during your career.
 
Think of a sound effects library as a collection of emotions. That’s exactly what it is.
 
Randy Thom